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Game time, a retrospective
Jan. 4th, 2023 12:41This year I "retired" from a mobile game that I picked up early during the pandemic as a distraction. I'm enjoying the relative liberation of my personal time, as the game had a lot of busywork. I'd grown dissatisfied over time, and had also tried and dropped other mobile games. I guess it could be considered a life hack, but factoring in human time spent and human attention spent (built-in automation can be a friend even in gaming), and keeping those in check (or even optimize for less investment of said human "resources") is a way to limit the trade-off in favor of other things that could be done.
In the resulting free time, I've been drawn to pick up an old and incomplete project of mine, to write an approximate port of an early RPG from the TRS-80 Model I era to modern Linux ncurses, which was made possible thanks to Unicode block graphics. When I last set it aside a few years ago, I could navigate through the dungeon, which was satisfying enough for the sake of nostalgia. I've just added the ability to pick up and drop treasure, keeping the quirky constraints of the original. Although the early BASIC version of the game is abandonware, a later PC port is being sold on Steam, so this project probably isn't going to see the light of day on Github, as I am parsing proprietary decoded game data for the dungeon levels. Thanks to the trs80gp emulator and an archival site, it's possible to play the original (and imperfect) game from old disk images.
All this got me thinking that it could be feasible to leverage Unicode symbols to make a roguelike that stayed with "text", avoiding graphical tiles that were dependent upon screen resolution. Unfortunately, I soon came to realize that the result was then dependent upon (client) fonts, as no font can encompass all of Unicode. Oh, well. At least it was sort of fun to explore the use of Unicode/wide character codes in ncurses.
Further along my retro mood, I recently dug up what appears to have been the final 0.90 release of the Omega roguelike, switched it back from graphical tiles to text, tweaked it for a clean compile, and posted the result on GitHub.
I vaguely wish I had someone to talk about this ideosyncratic pastime with, and hence you are seeing this post.
In the resulting free time, I've been drawn to pick up an old and incomplete project of mine, to write an approximate port of an early RPG from the TRS-80 Model I era to modern Linux ncurses, which was made possible thanks to Unicode block graphics. When I last set it aside a few years ago, I could navigate through the dungeon, which was satisfying enough for the sake of nostalgia. I've just added the ability to pick up and drop treasure, keeping the quirky constraints of the original. Although the early BASIC version of the game is abandonware, a later PC port is being sold on Steam, so this project probably isn't going to see the light of day on Github, as I am parsing proprietary decoded game data for the dungeon levels. Thanks to the trs80gp emulator and an archival site, it's possible to play the original (and imperfect) game from old disk images.
All this got me thinking that it could be feasible to leverage Unicode symbols to make a roguelike that stayed with "text", avoiding graphical tiles that were dependent upon screen resolution. Unfortunately, I soon came to realize that the result was then dependent upon (client) fonts, as no font can encompass all of Unicode. Oh, well. At least it was sort of fun to explore the use of Unicode/wide character codes in ncurses.
Further along my retro mood, I recently dug up what appears to have been the final 0.90 release of the Omega roguelike, switched it back from graphical tiles to text, tweaked it for a clean compile, and posted the result on GitHub.
I vaguely wish I had someone to talk about this ideosyncratic pastime with, and hence you are seeing this post.
